It’s release day for THE OGRE’S FAIRYTALE BRIDE! You can pick it up in eBook and Paperback today. I’ll include links, but if you’d prefer to shop brick and mortar, ask your local bookseller to order you a copy.
I’m so excited to have this book out in the world! I can’t wait for everyone to see Fablemere and get as lost in the world as I already am! Everyone says you should write the book you want to read. Well, I wanted to read about a fat, over-forty enby with epilepsy have a portal fantasy adventure and getting absolutely railed by a hot ogre. If that’s the book you want to read? WELL YOU ARE IN LUCK, FRIEND.
After ignoring severe abdomen and chest pain for about forty-eight hours, I was finally moved to visit the ER late last night. As it turns out, I have an enormous gallstone. If I were an oyster and you cut me open and found this thing, you’d be psyched. What this means is that my gallbladder needs to be removed very, very soon. This was totally unexpected and will throw a major wrench into my schedule. I will try to continue to post everything I need to post on time, but please be patient until this whole thing is over. I’m on pain meds and frankly, I don’t feel like doing a damn thing but lay around complaining until this thing is out. But I promise I will try hard!
If you enjoy an orgy of breakfast meats, I would recommend Roxie’s in Kalamazoo, MI. They have a meal called The Viking, which includes three eggs, sausage biscuits and gravy, pancakes, ham, sausage patties, sausage links, and hashbrowns. I’m not saying these things are related, I’m just saying that I ate it and now I’m getting an organ removed and it was delicious (the breakfast and not the organ). Zero regrets, highly recommend.
Fablemere season two begins today on Vella,Ream, and Patreon! If you’re already subscribed to the Fablemere tier or higher on Patreon, you don’t have to do anything extra. You’ll continue to get the posts in your Patron feed. If you’re reading on Vella, the chapters of season two will post in The Ogre’s Fairytale Bride serial. If you’re a Ream reader, you may need to follow the story to get updates, but no other changes to your tier or subscription need to be made. I’m trying to keep this as easy as possible!
Season two is going to be a total trip. Read on for the blurb!
A city is missing. So is her best friend.
Tabitha was having a normal day at work, until she found out her slacker boss is the legendary wizard, Merlin. Now, she’s in a fairytale land, on a mission to bring her best friend back to the real world. A mission that’s complicated by the disappearance of an entire city and a millennia of accidental time travel.
The only way to survive… is to die.
Out of medication and options, Vanessa knows it’s just a matter of time until she must become a vampire or die the kind of death that doesn’t involve a cool cape. But she can’t stop thinking about the ogre she left behind and the daring escape she promised him she would make. All she needs now is for Baron Scylas to make her one of his undead concubines—and he’s certainly taking his time.
He’s used to being alone. He’ll need help to rescue his true love.
Droguk won’t stop fighting for Vanessa until the day he dies. That day will come sooner if he doesn’t rely on a mage and his assistant, who claim to know Vanessa from her world and want to take her back there. Working together could mean rescuing his mate from the Baron’s clutches only to lose her… forever.
Hey there, friends! Have you heard of this thing called the ocean? Well, I have. And it is awful.
Last week, I did a big, scary thing. I traveled on a plane, all by myself, to South Carolina to spend a whole week in the Sea Pines neighborhood of Hilton Head Island with a friend and a group of seven other strangers who would not, my friend assured me, be mean to me.
I was so afraid someone would be mean to me. I am pleased to report that they did not.
I am also pleased to report that, although this opportunity presented itself on my connecting flight, I did not rush in and start flipping switches hither and thither, despite the nearly overwhelming temptation to do so:
There are switches on the ceiling. ON THE CEILING. I knew I could reach those bastards before the pilot could even stand up. I had this vivid image of smashing my hand on those buttons and just pressing everything frantically as they dragged me off the plane.
Since I controlled myself and did not get air marshalled straight to federal prison, I got to see the sun come up while I was in the sky:
Can I just interrupt this previously scheduled post to rant for just a second about people on airplanes? Not, you know, the fact that I forgot my mask on my return flight and ended up next to someone who sneezed constantly, loudly, and with alarming force and therefore I am now ill, myself? I need to address the jaded flyers out there. I know some of you are reading this thinking, “I fly all the time for work, so yes, I’m a jaded flyer.” You’re who I’m talking to, okay? With love, I’m talking to you.
YOU ARE IN THE GOD DAMNED SKY. I get that it happens a lot. Maybe you’re a pilot or a flight attendant and it’s all in a day’s work. But you’re in THE GOD DAMNED SKY. It’s a miracle! Imagine explaining this to your caveman ancestors. Or walking up to a medieval knight and being like, “Yeah, I was IN THE GOD DAMNED SKY FOR A COUPLE OF HOURS, but no big deal.”
It’s a big deal. Don’t let routine destroy the wonder and joy that you experience. YOU GO IN THE SKY.
I was pretty tired on my way down, owing to the fact that just hours before my flight, I got bit by my dog. It was an accident, she felt horrible, she would never bite me on purpose, but boy howdy, she’s an enormous pit bull/great dane mix and she got me BAD. I will spare you a photo, but suffice to say that after an ER visit, a shit ton of painful wound cleaning, and a prescription for enough antibiotics to permanently destroy my vaginal biome, I had just enough time to stop by the house for my luggage before leaving for the airport with a gauze-and-pressure-bandage wrapped hand. By the time I arrived in South Carolina, I’d been awake for thirty consecutive hours (with a light nap in the Charlotte airport). And by the time we went out for dinner that night, I was coming up on hour thirty-seven.
The food was worth staying awake for:
However, I do believe they were a bit stingy with their grits. It was good, don’t get me wrong, but the sauce-to-grits ratio was definitely off.
At the end of the day, I returned to this lovely little room. The picture over the headboard factors into the story later:
The next morning, refreshed from a brief, exhaustion-induced coma, I decided that I would venture to the ocean.
“There are paths to beach that run between the houses,” my friend Stella, who booked the trip and had experience staying in Sea Pines before, told me. There was a path behind our house, so that’s what I assumed she meant. I left the house with a little bowl of raspberries to munch on and followed the path.
It lead me right onto someone’s pool area.
Those were not the paths she was talking about. Later in the week, I noted that these little paths behind the houses were actually so landscapers and such could move about without being too visible. You know. Like how you want servants to be invisible when you live in a place where the five bedroom, five bathroom, over 3,000 square foot house we were staying in is a shack in comparison to everything else.
Yeah. This:
…is what passes for a modest home in Sea Pines. This gorgeous, heated pool and lushly landscaped patio area. You can see the path behind one of those chairs. Also, a giant ass house that I mistook for a hotel when we first arrived. Some of these places have legit hotel-sized mechanical systems outside for like, their A/C and such.
The actual beach access path was somewhere else, and I did not find it until later that day. When I did, I found this:
I’ve been to the ocean before, but never in South Carolina. I was a little shocked to learn that it looks about the same as it does in New England. I thought it would be, I don’t know, slightly different looking? Like how in some places it’s like this but in other places it looks blue or green? But it was like something out of Moby-Dick about 99% of the time I was there.
It’s also incredibly spooky, as each day that I visited, the ocean had picked something new to murder. The first day, the beach was covered in dying sand dollars. After that it was like, scallops, another day was horseshoe crabs just bashed to fucking pieces all over the place, and on one day, the whole thing was a jellyfish graveyard.
I learned that the sea is full of murder and gross stuff and I don’t feel like I need to interact with it further. Disgusting.
I got a lot of work done on this trip, lest you think I was just fooling around and writing negative reviews of the ocean. I came home with a little bit under 20,000 words written across three projects, and a whole bunch of knowledge from my new friends, who are all indie authors. We shared our tips and tricks (and I don’t have a lot of them) for sales and promotion and having successful signings, which made this not just a good trip for writing, but for network and branding and such.
And nobody was mean to me! I came home with new author friends, and we’re already planning to do it again next year.
Now that I’m back and not exactly rested, since my mask mistake resulted in creeping sickness (yes, I’ll test for Covid), I have good news!
The Business Centaur’s Virgin Temp is coming back from hiatus! You have until Friday to refresh your memories, because that’s when the next installment posts. Also, if you’ve been following Fablemere, season two, The Vampire’s Willing Captive, begins on Vella, Ream, and the $3 (USD) Patreon tier TOMORROW! On Vella, season two will be attached to The Ogre’s Fairytale Bride, so you don’t have to go looking for a different link.
The Ogre’s Fairytale Bride will be available in ebook and paperback on February 29th. You can pre-order the ebook now on Amazon, but printing issues with the paperback has pushed that pre-order back on other platforms. Hey, if a book release of mine ever ran smoothly, I would probably pass out from shock.
That’s all the news that’s fit to print right now. Stay tuned to find out what disease I got from going maskless on a plane.
